Two of Venture Capital’s Senior Women Start a New Firm

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

February 5, 2014

Two of the most senior women in Silicon Valley’s venture capital industry are leaving their well-known firms to start a new firm together.

Jennifer Fonstad, formerly a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Theresia Gouw, formerly a partner at Accel, are opening Aspect Ventures, through which they plan to invest in mobile start-ups and emphasize the value that diversity brings to companies.

“Mobile is a piece of everything we do because if you’re a tech company today, mobile falls all the way up and down the tech stack, from security and storage up to apps,” Ms. Gouw said.

“We think as women we bring a different perspective to the boardroom and these companies in how they approach problem-solving and strategic thinking,” Ms. Fonstad said. “It’s clearly not an industry that puts a lot of women in it, and we’re trying in our own way to illustrate how diversity makes a difference.”

The investors’ departures from their previous firms leave both without a single woman investing partner in their Silicon Valley offices.

The number of senior women at big venture capital firms has been shrinking across Silicon Valley. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, for example, once known for having a larger percentage of women investors than most firms, reorganized late last year, and it now counts just two women — Beth Seidenberg and Mary Meeker — among its seven general partners. (It is also facing a sexual harassment suit by a former junior partner.)

Just 11 percent of investing partners were women in 2011, the last year the National Venture Capital Association took a census, down from 14 percent in 2008.

Meanwhile, the venture capital industry has been undergoing huge changes. A flood of money resulted in funds that were so big that they sought to expand to multi-national and later-stage investments to invest all the money.

Ms. Gouw and Ms. Fonstad — who met 25 years ago at Bain and Company, their first job out of college, and have spent two decades in the venture capital industry — said they wanted to return to hands-on investing in companies when they are just starting and as they mature.

“We want to go back to our roots and just do the early stage stuff that we love,” Ms. Gouw said.

Their investment fund is made entirely of their own money. They declined to say how much they would be investing, but said that they would make investments of between $500,000 and $2 million in early stage companies and that they had enough capital to invest for several years.

Accel and DFJ are each in the process of raising new funds, so it was a natural transition point for the two to leave, they said. Ms. Fonstad said she would remain on the boards of her DFJ investments and Ms. Gouw said she would remain on the boards of many of hers.